Lovedrunk

You’ve got me lovedrunk again, spinning tales of our love, flights of fancy, revenge fucks, and all of the passion we’ve always had. It feels distilled, filtered through limestone into the clearest sparkle.

Maybe my fire worked, truly unburned us—my insecurities aren’t the ravenous beasts they used to be. You’ve thrown away your disdain for me, traded it in for awe. You’ve found another path, but no way around these intersections.

You stopped throwing stop signs onto the corners, allowing lanes for yielding into and out of a circle. We don’t have to stay in it, even if we take one more ride in this one, don’t have to take the same road out that brought us here.

The Champs-Élysées is still a linear road, but the Arc de Triomphe gives a dozen avenues to pursue, holds the tomb and the eternal flame. Zeus punishes Prometheus. We should have started there, in the evening in Paris without dreaming of Versailles or shopping in boutiques. We could have shared a croissant with coffee, a cigarette, and a kiss, could’ve tossed coins in a fountain.

I don’t care how much rain falls, which way the wind blows through my hair or up my skirt. I care about that feeling I get when I let go of the world and hold on to you with my eyes, when you find the me in me and let it enter you. My heart feels you inhale me, your blood beating in my lungs, your oxygen dispersed into the ventricles of my heart.

No one has been more aerobic, more present through absence, more elusively mine than that hero’s heart that keeps your blood circulating for those linear patterns that steady your quakes, keeping terra firma under the bridges over the water I swim in, pretending it’s not beneath me, letting the muddy silt where catfish lurk presume to elevate itself and wind-dry on bridges and embankments, claiming that the river is dirty while it dries into flaky minerals, sand to blow away.

We’ll never know Ozymandius completely, though we worship at altars and on prayer mats on our way to Canterbury or Mecca, strolling through fields of three-leaf clover while flowers bloom in trees, the embalmed dead in metal boxes blocking a return to the earth. Fill me with fire, not preservatives; give me oxygen and let my flames lick the heavens where they need it most, opening the gate, and throwing the bouncer out in the street.